Electronic mail (hereinafter “email”) has become one of the most widely used communication tools in the world. Most people use email systems at their workplace and at home, and with the increasing number of emails sent and received, the shortcomings of existing email systems are becoming clear.
One drawback to existing email systems is that managing emails, new incoming and new outgoing, and their subsequent replies and forwards, is increasingly difficult with the growing volumes of emails, and more often than not leads to cluttered inbox, sent, and deleted folders. The inbox folder often becomes cluttered because emails, new incoming emails as well as previously read emails, are stored in the inbox folder until a user manually moves the emails out of it. Emails get cluttered in the sent folder because new emails sent out by the user are stored in the sent folder, and replies and forwards sent by the user to others are also stored in the sent folder.
Over time, the clutter keeps increasing, and it is quite common for users to have hundreds of emails sitting in the inbox, sent mail, and other named folders. It takes considerable effort to move and keep moving the emails into other named folders, to keep the clutter from growing. As the emails are moved into named folders, the named folders themselves get cluttered with repetitive emails. The user is afraid to delete any email (in inbox, sent or named folders) for fear of losing something important, and because of time constraints is unlikely to sift through these emails in order to reduce their redundancy.
While each email does contain some new data in the form of the latest email message, it likely contains a repetition of earlier emails as an appendix, which may be in the form of “quoted” text continuing after the new message or in the form of a separate file attached to the email. When the number of participants in an email increases, the potential for clutter increases very rapidly and in direct proportion to the increase in number of participants. Some users may spend the time and effort to move emails on a particular subject, or grouping, into specific named folders, reducing the amount of clutter in the inbox, sent and deleted folders, but many or even most do not.
Another drawback to current email management approaches is that identifying, extracting and using data residing in emails can get extremely cumbersome because the data may be resident in conceivably twenty, thirty, forty or more than a hundred emails on a particular subject. These emails may also reside in different folders, such as the inbox, sent and other named folders, and possibly in the deleted folder too. It can become impenetrable, if the need for data tucked away in various emails arises after several days when one's memory may not be as sharp, or if data is contained in emails with several subject headings. Information on a particular topic cannot be easily collated from various emails, and printing the various emails for a hard copy reference is a voluminous job with diminishing utility as the number of emails grows.
In general, current approaches provide two ways to meaningfully use the data contained in multiple emails. One way is to highlight the required text, a few words or several lines at a time, in an email that is open on the user's screen, and copy it into another document (word processing or email or other), and then to repeat this process over several emails. Another way is to create an exported output of the email into a file, instead of paper, and then use the output of the resulting file in another document which may be a word processing document, or an email or some other document, and then to repeat this process over several emails.
Many email management systems provide search facilities to identify the emails that may contain specified words or phrases. The search result identifies the emails that satisfy the specified search criteria. But once the emails have been identified, either by manually going through several emails, or by the quicker search routines, the problem of extracting the data and using it from the several identified emails remains. The problem can be partially addressed by going into each email, one at a time, and using one of the two ways described above, highlighting or using an export function to create an output file, to extract and use the data. As the number of emails increases, so does the effort. These limitations, combined with the clutter of large numbers of emails, make it extremely difficult to use the data from the emails in a meaningful manner.
Another drawback to current approaches is that data is repeated over and over in replies and forwards, both sent and received, using valuable disk space. Additionally, particularly at the corporate or enterprise level, backups and historical records maintenance become more cumbersome and costly. The extent of data repetitiveness in emails, and redundancy due to multiplicity of mostly identical emails, can be quite a serious problem in terms of how much storage space is used for periodic backups as a security measure and for archiving, tasks which may be statutory requirements for many companies. If multiple copies of emails are eliminated or avoided in backups, it may be possible to reduce the manpower and memory requirements of email backups and archiving.
Another drawback to current approaches is that as users keep sending and receiving emails, the subject of the emails evolves, but emails are sent using the same subject heading. Sometimes a subject heading may be changed to reflect a new evolved status of the old subject, but the content of old as well as new subjects may continue under the new subject heading. In essence, the current system of emails allows a subject heading, but does not allow any organized way of enforcing that subject heading (i.e. limiting the discussion to that subject heading).
Current email management approaches have no organized way to manage subject headings as they evolve or change into subheadings. In one case, the subject heading does not change, but the content of emails may be on revised but related subjects (evolution of the original subject), thus making data collection and analysis from emails even more difficult than already described. In another case, the subject heading changes to reflect an evolution from the original subject, but some email users may continue to send text based on the old subject but use the new subject headings, thus once again making it difficult to delete or organize the emails.
Another drawback to current approaches occurs when the subject itself does not evolve, but there is simply a natural passage of time. Current approaches do not permit a systematic way to continue emails on an old subject after a period of absence of emails on the subject. If a user receives an email on an old subject after a long break, the potential for the email containing one or more of the following is rather high: the sender may fail to append older emails exchanged on that topic (i.e. a new email instead of a reply/forward to an older email on the subject), or fail to write the same subject in the subject line, or worse, send an appendix of other irrelevant emails while sending the email on the subject. Currently, the user has to review the clutter of emails in various folders to obtain a history of that subject. This makes it very difficult for the user to ascertain the context behind the new message. Thus, the new message may be difficult to understand.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.